Users of handheld devices, such as cellular mobile telephones, communicators, multimedia phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), handheld gaming devices, and the like, and combinations thereof, collectively referred to herein as “handheld devices,” desire that such devices provide telecommunication services, as well as gaming, entertainment, and other features that require sophisticated graphical user interfaces (GUI's). A need has therefore arisen to develop and provide sophisticated user interfaces (UI's) that provide enhanced gaming and entertainment capabilities, which are also intuitive to use.
One common UI used in gaming and other applications is a rocker. Rockers tend to be very compact and are therefore adaptable for use with handheld devices, such as cell phones. A rocker may be depressed at any one of a number of points, such as four, five, eight, or nine points, located on the rocker. For example, a rocker with four such points, may be depressed at a selected point to indicate orthogonal directions such as up, down, left, or right. However, many applications, such as games, require much more agility in motion and pointing capability than is permitted with even as many as nine different points that may be indicated by a rocker.
An improvement in the agility and pointing capability of a rocker is found in a pointing device, such as a “joystick,” which may be moved in any of a virtually infinite number of different spatial directions to control the movement of an object, such as a cursor, on a screen, such as a GUI. For this reason, joysticks are often a UI of choice for many gamers. However, due to the nature of joysticks, namely, that they inherently consume a substantial amount of space, they have not been considered practical for use with handheld devices, such as cell phones.
Accordingly, a continuing search has been directed to the development of apparatuses and methods by which a user may obtain the advantages of compactness provided by rockers, as well as the advantages of greater agility and pointing capabilities provided by pointing devices, such as joysticks.